Check out the latest VB ad - Stubby Symphony. Clever execution but what will the purist think of the softer tone to this “Blue” anthem?

It’s official, Warnie will grace the living rooms of cricket lovers across the nation this summer for VB, taking off where Boony and Beefy ended. Being a little fussy about where he sits though, Warnie has decided to bring his own VB couch from where he will interact with the TV broadcast of the One Day International Series and give you his take on things. “Bowl Warnie!!”

There’s a lot more to come but for now you can register your interest at the VB Warnie website. Stay tuned or check after the jump for more launch images. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re known to brand a few products from time to time, but this got me thinking that perhaps its gone too far. Then I noticed it was an idea branded by atypyk - They have some cool stuff. Supposedly this puzzle is meant to be a collection of the world’s most important brands, well most important American brands maybe. So if you wanted to give your little ones a head start in the promotional products industry, this might be just the tool you’re looking for. Otherwise at 36 Euros, it’s what the Americans would call an expensive promotional schwag!

I can’t really argue with Coke, Apple, Macca’s and Nike but I’m not so sure about Playboy and the hanging Pine tree car freshener??

Here is another unconventional article on promotional schwag that looks at the greatest moments in promotional product history. It’s a Wired article so it’s a little US-ish.

via swissmiss

We’ve combined with a group of other talented people to form 808south. There’s no firm category at present for what we aim to do but it revolves around the interactive space. We bring together emerging technologies and interactive thinkers to build complete brand strategies. Our projects fuse sensory engagement with marketing savvy to deliver brand experiences.

The sole focus is around the iBar at the moment, check it out on the 808south website.

For those of you who may have read The Age or Sydney Morning Herald on Friday just gone may have noticed a little paragraph or two about the upcoming promotion this summer. It was tucked in at the end of an article on the last sports pages. It’s true, Mr Warne will be replacing Boony and Beefy as the VB ambassador for this summer’s cricket season. We’re sad to see Boony (and Beefy) go but all good things must end at some point. Keep it locked here for more…

We attended the APPA Pyramid Awards 2007 last night at the rather impressive Palace Ball Room at the Regent Theater on Collins Street. I think everyone here missed the note about a ‘blue theme’, it seemed we were the only table in the entire room that didn’t have blue on. We did make up for it today though, some people around here look a little blue in the face! Must have been all that red water they kept serving us.

Anyway, the awards were handed out very briskly this year. We took out 2 pyramids again only this time there was no platinum. Boony and Beefy were out done by some red nosed wombats. Come to think of it, there weren’t many awards handed out that didn’t end up in wombat paws.

Well done guys! You know who you are.

Well done to the guys here as well for our 2007 pyramids:

Bronze - HP ‘Back To Work’
Gold - VB ‘Boonanza - Battle of the Tashes’

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This is a little off-topic in terms of promotional marketing, but I just discovered that you can now embed Google Maps directly onto your websites as if it were a youtube video. You can build your own maps and then customise the size of how you want the map displayed. Google will automatically provide you with the HTML code to embed onto your site - Brilliant!!

I can think of a few great applications already for some upcoming projects. The only problem was that the Accure listing although displaying the correct location in text actually pointed to some far out joint in the middle of nowhere between Pascoe Vale and the Western Ring Road (don’t ask how that happened). We’ve since corrected the listing of course with images and all, but Google tells us there’ll be a 3-4 week delay in going live. The funny thing is that if you grab ‘n’ scroll down on the live map we’ve embedded above to marker ‘B’, you’ll find our updated listing?? Just can’t embed that particular marker at the moment. Nope, the live listing is not available yet.

I think this is great stuff but it seems I’m the only one in the office excited about it.

UPDATE 23/08/07 - Map updated by Google

Not that many readers would care but we’ve worked out what we’re doing with brandslappers.com - Take a a sneak peak. It’s the back end of a print advertisement we’re running for this year’s APPA awards.

Here’s an interesting idea from the designer who gave us Flashbag. If pushing numbered buttons on an ugly plastic brick is not your thing, then perhaps flicking through a chain of glowing orbs will take your fancy - Meet Remobeads - remote control beads.. Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies for the silence lately, but we’ve been extremely busy working away on a number of projects but hopefully we’re back on track with some regular posts.

Inspired by a term that’s being thrown around with it’s fair share of negative light in the promotional products industry and an upcoming self promotion campaign, we thought we’d do something. We set up brandslappers.com. And by set up we mean that we’ve registered the domain name, uploaded an image, set up a basic inbox and written this post. We still don’t know what the hell we’re going to do with it. The term brandslapper has a good ring to it though, maybe we should change our whole company name to brandslappers. If you have any ideas, we’d love to hear them or read them…